[hopefulengineer]

Older family friend made $30/hr in the 60-70s with pension and benefits working in a meat packing plant with a high school education. Same job today pays $15/hr with no benefits thanks to illegal immigration. There's a reason people like the Koch brothers spend millions in support of illegal immigration, they wanted to drive down the labor cost for jobs like the above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0

Offshoring and illegal immigration has killed low skill jobs and given billion dollar multinational corporations the ability to demand whatever they want from workers because they have unlimited labor supply.

This doesn't just effect low skill labor either, it forces more people to go to college and take on debt which then drives down the wages of high skill work as well. It's a scam and the american people should be angry

[octonion]

The root cause is the destruction of unions and worker's rights. It has nothing to do with legal or illegal immigration.

[pike1]

For a limited number of positions, if you have a bigger pool of people to hire from, the wages will automatically go down. This is simple economics.

While the union effect might also be playing a role, it's curious that you rush to deny the big obvious factor while propping up a relatively minor reasoning factor as a primary one.

[codyb]

Probably because it seems doubtful that ten million people (the estimated number of illegal aliens in the US), tanked wages for everyone in a country of 330 million.

It's curious you immediately point to illegal immigration as the big obvious factor with no citations to support your claims.

The fact is wages have been stagnating since the seventies and most people attribute that to the weakening of unions, offshoring, and automation before illegal immigration.

The US is producing twice as much today as it was in 1984 with a third less workers. That seems like it'd have a much bigger impact to me. And painting immigrants as the reason American's qualities of life has dropped off seems disingenuous, simplistic, and prejudiced.

[DrJosiah]

1. I think your heart might be in the right place, but I think your facts are mistaken / misunderstood.

2. Kochs are horrible people, but historically their union-busting, and other worker rights protection attacks are the cause of income falling at their refineries and other family-owned manufacturing plants in MN, WI, KS, etc. (If you want to see what full-on Koch / Republican leadership does to a place, look at what Kansas has become).

3. You (and Ezra, and most of the watchers) misunderstand Bernie Sanders in a few ways. Yes, low income earners would be great for Koch, but Koch is happy to pay Americans low income. Because they don't need foreign workers if they just pay American politicians to screw American workers out of worker protections, health care, etc: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?id=d000000186

4. Misunderstanding Bernie #2: open borders was brought up in the context of increasing immigration as an opening question. And Bernie said it was a Republican idea / Koch brothers idea because the context in July 2015 was that it is a Boogeyman. It was created as an idea to scare politically conservative people away from the "left" / "Democrats", as a "these crazy Democrats want open borders", not that anyone ever actually proposed as much. How do I know? Because that shit came back again this summer, making the same claims that Dems want open borders, which again had to be put down.

5. The vast majority of illegal immigrant held jobs in the United States are not jobs that Americans want to do. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/illegal-immigrants-us-economy-f...

Maybe the Kochs are different in Texas, but most of what I've seen from them has been pretty consistent with: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/koch-brothers

So yeah, hate the Kochs. Please. They are not good people. But hate them for the right reasons, not because you think they are pro illegal immigration or pro open borders (they aren't).